Daily Inspiration Quote by Wim Wenders

Wenders is diagnosing a cultural shift where the boundary between art, commentary, and publicity collapses into one continuous feed. “Everything is entertainment” isn’t a tired complaint about shallow audiences; it’s a filmmaker’s alarm that the entire ecosystem that once protected risk-taking work has been repurposed as content. When “criticism is now entertainment,” the critic stops being a translator or adversary and becomes a performer, rewarded for heat over insight. The review becomes a clip, the takedown becomes a personality, and the point isn’t to evaluate a film but to keep the audience watching.

The jab at “French directors” lands because French cinema long traded on an unusually robust cultural infrastructure: serious journals, a prestige circuit, a state that treated film as patrimony, a public trained to argue about cinema as art. Wenders suggests that safety net was never purely aesthetic; it was institutional. When he says they “woke up… and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more,” he’s describing the moment an old world notices it has been quietly defunded - financially, yes, but also rhetorically. The backing was attention shaped by expertise, not just eyeballs.

His intent is less to scold France than to mourn a lost contract: artists take risks, critics take them seriously, institutions absorb the cost of failure. In the entertainment-ization of criticism, that contract dissolves. What’s left is exposure without support, visibility without protection - and a cinema culture that can still talk loudly while listening less.